I have a request. I want a mechanical battery creation tool and a gear creation tool. Now please hear me out. As far as I can tell, these are 2D custom tools with adjustable extrusion.

A mechanical battery is just a Spiral, when it's tight it is wound up and ready to release energy, when it has a lot of space throughout the spiral it is loose and waiting to be wound.

Anyhow, I like Clockwork Art. The three components common to much of it is gears, mechanical battery, and a key to apply to the mechanical battery.

So, to me, the mechanical battery tool and the gear tool would add a great deal to what Curvy is able to do quickly. Because clockwork art is all about the illusion that the curvy living thing merges with the hard mechanical thing.

Well, please consider this. I have been hesitant saying anything, but since I have wanted these things, I might as well ask.

Now Curvy has Bezier imports from SVG both of these effects can be easily achieved by making the outline in a vector art program like Inkscape, then importing the curves as a Slab like this:

To do the whole job in Curvy will need some more work...

A Spiral primitive is on the wishlist in Curvy, mixed with some of the improvements to the Line object this should be able to make a rectangular cross section spiral like the ones you show.

You can make the Gear objects with a combination of a Slab object and the new Array duplication tool with a rotation as the offset. However this would need some extra work to join all the duplicated segments and keep them clean. A better solution would involve some symmetry settings on the Slab object itself, so the duplication array effect happens on the curve itself - before it is filled out as a 3D shape.

Overall I recommend the first approach above, switching to a fully featured 2D vector program to draw the trickiest shapes, and using Curvy's curve editor for the rest.

FWIW it doesn't look like you need to do a thing.The results from those imported SVGs and the slab primitive look incredibly clean!Can we see a wireframe of those slabs?Is there a density or detail slider? I get the feeling they are quite heavy on the polys.

The way the Slab works is to take each vertex in the curve and turn that into a vertex in the slab mesh. You can see the curve vertices when you turn on wireframe. You can reduce the Slab polies by reducing the curve's verts - eg: by replacing some of the curves with straight segments. (Future work - I could add a detail slider when you import from SVG to say how many vertices to use on curved segments)

Here are the faces counts, they are fairly high, but it's still fine to have 100's of this complexity of object in a Curvy scene. You could also use Proxy/Instances to reduce the poly cost of the scene.

Wow, those look nice. I was thinking the Inkscape route. Though I admit the spiral tool thoughts within curvy sound really nice. The count is high. I hope my mere 8gb with only enough virtual memory for logging will hold up. Maybe gears inside of inkscape and mechanical batteries inside of Curvy 4.0. That would be really nice. The gears are where the 2D complexity might come in, so inkscape is a good option.

I feel this goes hand in hand with better group controls - like visible bounding boxes. Each Group already has a colour in Curvy... but it is not used for anything. It is certainly possible to use that colour for the lines and bounding boxes of that group's objects. I can try adding a "use group colours" option to see how that looks in practice.

I agree the triangulation can look a bit irregular. Different methods produce different patterns and the current one tends to make triangle fans around a few points, rather than spreading the triangles evenly. I may try some different methods to make more regular looking triangulations.

You'll notice if you start using the sculpting tools that the surface will reorganise into a much more even mesh as part of the auto-subdivision scheme. But it always helps if the original mesh is as even as possible to avoid distortions.